This is my friend Mel’s photo of “seeing” the Mona Lisa a few weeks ago. It makes me chuckle each time I look at it. That’s a lot of eyes to follow round the room. Of all the holiday photos Mel sent, this one particularly struck a chord, as it reminded me of what I saw last week in Phyllida Barlow’s show at Hauser & Wirth.
Every floor of the gallery’s historic building on Piccadilly was filled to bursting with her sculptures. It was as crammed as the tourist filled streets outside… and yet, strangely, not claustrophobic. I don’t know if it was the warmth of the colours and the materials, but it felt comfortable. For want of a better way of saying it, the sculptures were friendly – a difficult feat to pull off, given their size and setting.
On the whole, I tend to see the over-crowdedness of city living as a negative thing, but walking round this exhibition made me think about it in a different way: there is a weird comfort in the closeness of things, in the clamour and profusion of urban texture. Our selves and our surroundings rub off on each other – we have to share, whether we like it or not; we have to collaborate, whether we like it or not.
I read once that the real surprise inherent in viewing the Mona Lisa is not the optical illusion of her eyes, nor the mystery of her smile, nor the layers of mountains or jewellery or whatever it was that got painted over, but the fact that she was painted over many years with a single hair brush – there are no brushstrokes to be seen, just tiny, individually insignificant parts making up the smooth whole… No wonder we still queue up to see her, she’s like us.
